An overview of how our family is prepared

“The other is to make sure you have a good insurance company” such a thing exists?

> Zombie apocalypses are a fun meme ...

A) Not really that much fun (as evidenced by how shitty life gets for pretty much everyone in "The Walking Dead"). ;)

B) In my mind "The Zombie Apocalypse" has always just been an amusing way to generically refer to whatever future real "apocalypse" might happen to occur (eg; broken water main, ice storm, etc).

Mine is just a shelf of Chef Boyardee and Campbell's.

I eat one or two a week as regular lunches, to rotate stock. When there's some room at the empty end of the shelf, I shove everything down, and buy some new cans to stuff in at the intake end.

It takes no more time than going to the pantry for a can of soup regularly would. And saves time, because I'm _never_ out and scrambling to find another option. Whether I'm 8 cans down or 24, one trip to the store will replenish it regardless.

Don't overcomplicate it. Folks who blog about things tend to do so because they're proud they achieved something difficult, so you compare yourself to a difficult standard. Resist that.

> 30 days of spare food feels like such an enormous amount of space and material.

Freeze dried stuff can be sit on a cool, dark shelf for a decade or two; a popular company:

* https://mountainhouse.com/

Also need to have a source of water and a way to boil it.

There are different strategies. One is to have cheap dry food plus some canned food in 5 gallon buckets. If you buy dry food like beans, rice, and pasta, you can get them from Walmart/Costco for about $1 a pound. This type of food will last a number of years, more if you put them in Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers. You need roughly 1 pound of food per person per day, and you can fit about 30 lbs of food in a 5 gallon bucket. For a family of four, you’ll need about 5 buckets for 30 days if you want to put in some canned food and things like spices etc so it’s palatable. A lot of people have some out of the way corner they can put 5 buckets.

Of course you’ll need a way to cook the dry food. The most sustainable way I know of is a small portable solar system and an instant pot. The instant pot is very energy efficient so you don’t need a very big solar system depending on where you live. If you store flour, you can also get a bread maker, which is pretty efficient.

The reason I like this strategy is that it’s cheap, and you don’t have to think about it very often. You can just trash the food after some number of years. You also don’t have to eat food close to its expiration date normally.

The only hiccup is fat. Cooking oil goes rancid, so you probably want to replace that every year or so, but canola/soybean oil is very cheap.

Of course none of this is very healthy, so you’ll want to include some vitamins…

I’d just do your best to keep extra of stuff you know you’ll eat, you know the old two is one and one is none.

Grab 2 packs of dried pasta instead of 1 for example. Rice. Beans. Canned stuff like veggies, fish, even the little single serve veg/beans etc.

Anything is better than nothing which is where most people land. Even knowing you got enough food stuffs for a day is enough comfort to ward off panic in disaster situations.

A 24/30pk of 500ml water can be had for like $5/10. Also very useful outside of disaster if they’re cycled through.

I feel similarly, but I did get some stuff in Feb 2020 when I could tell that COVID was going to be a huge deal. Camp stove, water storage containers, bulk bags of dry beans and rice, and several buckets of freeze dried food that have a shelf life of decades and could keep my family alive for at least a couple months. It's not really enough tbh, but it's something.

Even if things do break down such that you need years of food people have the wrong things. You don't need gas for your generator, you need to learn how to live like 500 years ago - without all that. Have enough food to last until next spring, and enough seeds and farming knowledge (which you can get from a few books that you read after the disaster) that you can continue to live off of your garden.

As I said elsewhere, make sure you can share knowledge and work with other survivors. A community of people with various skills (even if you give them the book and they learn it) makes survival a lot easier. Maybe your garden fails, but if you have a few other people you work with you can support each other and everybody lives.

So my neighbours hate me, but somehow major disaster changes that?

> won't allow looters in the neighborhood

My neighbours will be the first one to "equally share" everything I have with random junkies.

> if you die ... your preparation can save someone else's life.

Yeah, my neighbours make sure I die, and my stash will save their life.

Sat in CERT and emergency coordination meetings in the Pacific Northwest. If the > 9.0 earthquake happens that is predicted, it will take a week to get temporary shelters working. All supplies will get flown to the few large airports east of the cascades (Redmond OR, Tri-Cities WA, Yakima, WA, etc). Because all the small bridges on moutain passes will collapse (creeks, small rivers, etc) all supplies will be helicoptered over the mountains until they can get Army Corps of Engineers teams in to rebuild runways.

They suggested having at LEAST a weeks worth of supplies, and more if you don't want to be waiting in a very impatient line with a bunch of scared, hungry people that may be desperate.

The other data is harder to quantify, but kind of insane. Like how long DHS estimates it will take to rebuild I-5 (minus major bridges) as a passable road, along with some key railroads, and basic power.

Absolutely reliably the best way to increase your chance of survival in a situation like this is to have good relations with your neighbours in a good community with high trust.

A large number of people working together will be much more likely to find solutions than a few isolated individuals. The isolated individuals may have disproportionately large survival resources, but probably not for long. If you are in the caring-is-sharing group you will have a much better chance than being in the me-me-bang-oh-shit group.

But there are a lot of people who fear community solidarity because it might lead to people asking questions about private jets and beach condos.

> We had no water, power, or telecommunications for several days, no way to reach the outside world until the nearby cell towers came back online unless you had Starlink.

Amateur ("ham") radio can be handy. If you don't want to go to the effort to get a radio, a receive-only AM/FM crank/solar radio can be handy to get news.

He lives in Washington. His likely disasters are not ones that mean move. Maybe a wildfire - some parts of Washington get fires, but they don't get hurricanes, and most are not subject to flooding (though this depends on where you live, one block down the street might be a problem - if he lives on the top of the hill is plans should be those living near the bottom shelter at his house).

Plan for the disasters that are likely where you are. I have plans for a tornado - I shelter in my basement until it blows over, and then the next morning the police will help me get to a hotel (tornadoes are to sudden too evacuate in time, but small enough that the local hotels have extra room). I don't have plans for a hurricane because the closest I get to a hurricane is when the weather reports the minor rain we are seeing is what is left of a major hurricane a week ago.

Prepping should be local. Here in Scotland the things I would prioritize are snowstorms (once had food delivery to supermarkets delayed for several days) and high winds (friend was without power for six days). Here we don't get true hurricanes or tornadoes, and the high winds events have been shelter in place events.

Some places in the UK might have to start worrying more about wildfires. Flooding is definitely on the rise.

(UK flooding is nearly always "you can save a lot of expensive damage with careful sandbagging" rather than "entire building swept away", though)

> I would expect that China would activate their dormant ICS and telco access in such a circumstance to knock the US out of the conflict basically immediately

If they could do this, wouldn't they already have moved on Taiwan?

Does the US still have enough material to intervene over Taiwan anyway?

But in any case a month makes it more likely you can try and find another source. Better to have some runway than none?

Why? Water for flushing is nice for hygiene in the most common case of short outages. And there's very little storage annoyance - heck if you need a bucket for a project, you dump it out and fill it back up from the hose when done.

Drinking water requires more expensive containers, and some thinking around keeping it fresh (rotation & potentially some chemical additives like bleach).

Technically that's 60L for flushing.

Not really. Not being able to flush is annoying, but you can do that outside. There are some health risks but they are manageable (human waste carries pathogens). 3 days is a very long disaster: if things are that bad you need to start activating other plans anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if where he lives he can just go to a nearby stream and refill his flush water anytime he wants.

Water is critical to life and so you want to be sure civilization won't return before you risk drinking random water. That said, I'd keep a camping water treatment instead (there are lots of options) since they take up less space.

Every daylight savings time, I rotate my stored water. I empty out my containers, refilling them with, then add 7 drops of bleach per gallon.

* Edit * I've been asked before what the best survival book is. Honestly, it is One Second After by William R. Forstchen. It's probably the best description scenario that could occur.

It is not those regurgitated line drawings that everyone copies from Euell Gibbons, or rehashed rule of 3's survival books.

You don’t. You have RO at the point of consumption. At any rate, it’s our approach, we store 150,000L in a cistern over the winter and use it through the summer. An under-the-counter domestic RO system can be had for like $200, the membranes last about a year with our usage, and are like $15 a pop. Post-RO storage tank UV block too because I like belts and braces.

Non-potable just goes through the usual barrels full of sand and biochar, and doesn’t need further treatment.

You rotate it every ~6 months:

* https://www.cdc.gov/water-emergency/about/how-to-create-and-...

The old stuff can be used to water house plants or your garden. If you have advanced warning of an event (e.g., hurricane), you can also fill up a large reserve 'just in time':

* https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/waterbob-bathtub-liner-rev...

Many houses have hot water heaters, which IMO is plenty for most people and the water naturally gets replaced through normal use.

At the condo, I just rotate pet bottles. They are quite fimr for like a month, outside of direct sunlight.

And water can be always treated to make it drinkable again.

If the world's population drops 99% odds are you are in the 99% not here anymore.

Hunter gatherers live in a small village (the village moves, but it is still a village) and depend on other people in the village for things. There are only a tiny number of people ever who have lived all along for long.

What do you mean? I assume the "we" and "our" refers to the author and his wife.